1. The pain in my tooth right now. A long-living crack at the front of a molar has caused me no end of trouble and this week was no exception, when an infection combined with a shabby filling saw me shaking-n-quaking in the dentist’s office yesterday. The little fecker also made me break my amazing achievement of 4 filling and one re-filling without anesthetic.

This record has nothing to do with bravery and is actually the result of a crippling fear of needles.

There was a rather embarrassing incident where I shouted in high-pitch “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!!?” and half-leaped off the chair when the dentist came at me out of nowhere with a syringe! In all fairness though, what was he thinking!?

2. Ducks. This morning the Luas screeched to a halt, sending its passengers tumbling to the ground to avoid squashing a family of ducks that were toddling across the tracks.

As everyone clamoured to the the window to get a good look, we saw a helpful pedestrian shoo the mammy and her three babies across the tracks and through the traffic to the wall beside a park. At that point he grabbed one of the babies and he threw it through the fence, while the mother was getting quite violent in defence.

Now I know he was trying to get them away from the road but he dropped that baby from a height of about 3 feet into overgrown grass. My first thought was to what I was taught in school about touching birds’ nests. Apparently if the parents smell human off the nest, they will abandon the nest and the chicks, and I had this terrible feeling that the mother would disown her baby.

The man then proceeded to do the same to the remainder of the babies while the Luas passengers watched, with half the crowd going AWWWHHHH every two seconds and the other half looking slightly worried at what this Good Samaritan was doing.

At this point I was also wondering (a) how he was going to catch the mammy AND get her through the narrow railings and (b) why he was putting them inside an enclosed park when they were quite obviously from the river on the other side of the road and tracks.

I didn’t find out what happened because the Luas drove off and I’ve spent the entire morning worrying about the fate of ducks!

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Secret Stories was an initiative on A Chick Named Hermia that gave readers the opportunity to tell a story or a secret or simply get something off their chests anonymously. Entries have now closed, but you can read past stories by clicking this link